SF supervisors consider banning cannabis stores from...

1of2This Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2010 photo shows a view of Grant Street in Chinatown in San Francisco. Although many of the original inhabitants have moved out to other areas of the city as well as suburbs, this is still a starting point for many new immigrants from Asia. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)Photo: Eric Risberg / Associated Press 2010

2of2Shops on Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where a ban on cannabis retailers is being proposed.Photo: Eric Risberg / AP

Chinatown, one of San Francisco’s densest and most colorful neighborhoods, is home to everything from vast banquet halls to tiny dim sum parlors, a fortune cookie factory to traditional medicine shops. One thing it doesn’t have? A cannabis dispensary.

And it could stay that way if the Board of Supervisors passes an ordinance Tuesday that would ban marijuana retailers from Chinatown.

“Our zoning laws have always respected the desires of local neighbors ... and this is no different,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, the sponsor of this ordinance whose district includes Chinatown. “There has been a decades-long movement to keep Chinatown Chinatown.”

Since California legalized recreational cannabis last year, San Francisco Chinatown residents have overwhelmingly opposed a dispensary opening up on their turf. Last year during a hearing about opening a dispensary in the Sunset, dozens of Chinese American residents spoke against its opening, comparing marijuana use to the opioid epidemic.

But those against the ban worry about the precedent it could set for other neighborhoods, as well as the message it will send an industry already struggling for normalization in the city.

Wing Hoo Leung, president of the Community Tenants Association, said a unique set of factors in Chinatown makes a ban necessary in the neighborhood: Extremely dense housing, intense fears of gentrification and a cultural aversion to cannabis.

“Secondhand smoke continues to be a problem for many of our tenants,” he said in an April letter to the Board of Supervisors. “In lower-income communities, we live on top of each other, and every decision impacts a neighbor.”

Despite the community opposition, the San Francisco Planning Commission voted 5-2 against the Chinatown ban in June. Those opposed to the ordinance said they couldn’t support a piecemeal approach to regulating the industry in the city.

“I think some communities have more political power than others, and I’m worried about what we’re creating,” Planning Commissioner Myrna Melgar said at the hearing.

There are no pending applications for dispensaries in Chinatown. Peskin noted that there are a number of dispensaries within walking distance of Chinatown, and several pending applications for others in nearby neighborhoods in his district.

But Johnny Delaplane of the San Francisco Cannabis Retailers Alliance said a ban from one neighborhood could harm the cannabis industry, which is struggling to integrate into the city, as well as with a cumbersome permitting process, steep state taxes and a possible gross receipts tax at the local level.

“The most important thing that we can do with cannabis in the Chinese community is provide education ... they see it as a dangerous drug,” he said. “Precedent is certainly a concern.”

Peskin’s legislation has four co-sponsors: Jane Kim, Katy Tang, Sandra Lee Fewer and Ahsha Safai. Supervisor Rafael Mandelman — one of the newest supervisors on the board — said Monday he had yet to make up his mind about how he will vote at Tuesday’s meeting.

Mandelman said the fear of cannabis is “irrational, counterproductive and cannot be the basis for making policy in this city.”

But, he added, he is also sympathetic to the intensity of opposition from the Chinese community.

“If there is any chance in which I would vote for a cannabis restriction, it would be this, out of respect for that community,” he said. “But I’m struggling with it. I certainly don’t want to participate in what could very easily be a slippery slope.”

Trisha Thadani is a City Hall reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle. She previously covered work-based immigration and local startups for the paper’s business section.

Thadani graduated from Boston University with a degree in journalism. Before joining The Chronicle, she held internships at The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and was a Statehouse correspondent for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.